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... sort of conspiracy of the “ruling class” against the rest of society.
The existence of a ruling class, opposed to a “ruled” and “exploited”
class, might be a surprise for a conservative social studies teacher who
only knows “citizens,” but this fact alone doesn’t say very much. All soci­
eties that ...

... converges towards the value of labour power, which depends on “historical and
moral” factors and which can change over the medium or long term.
However, in Marx’s analysis, changes in the real wage and in the rate of
surplus value appear to be determined exclusively in the labour market. Let us
...

... that the Scotsman was concerned with ‘that physical, truly natural relation between commodities’ (D3/12/11: 83). He also used the term ‘physical value’ of products and insisted
that it ‘is equal to what has been consumed’ (D3/12/1: 5; see also D3/12/10: 54).
The idea expressed in feature (4) can be ...

... higher rentals. In these cases clean air and sunshine
are economic goods rather than free goods.
All the gifts of nature are sometimes regarded as
free goods, since they are not produced by humans.
But in many instances it requires effort and cost to
make them useful to humans. Minerals have to be
m ...

... deprived of water because this is only brought to their houses if someone is prepared to defray the cost of laying the pipes. River water is
so dirty as to be useless for cleansing purposes. The poor are forced to
throw into the streets all their sweepings, garbage, dirty water, and
frequently even ...

... claim that in their conception the value of labor-power still represents
a share of the total abstract labor performed, it is self-evident that a
“value” that is not the objectification of the social determinations of the
material production process of the commodity that acts as its “bearer,”
can ha ...

... claim that in their conception the value of labor-power still represents
a share of the total abstract labor performed, it is self-evident that a
“value” that is not the objectification of the social determinations of the
material production process of the commodity that acts as its “bearer,”
can ha ...

... the utopian socialists and British Owenites with exaggerating the potential of
monetary reforms to alter the social system. They falsely imagined that the defects
of the economic system could be removed by tinkering with money, just as the
‘bourgeois apologists’ Bastiat and Carey did, even if in a d ...

... go in LVT. In other words, the market value of the site in rental terms would fall from £10,000 to £8,000.
However, the total land value of the site would remain £10,000. It is just that £2,000, out of the £10,000,
would now go to the community as a whole – that is those responsible for creating the ...

... capitalist economies would follow the pattern of British capitalist development. Thus Marx’s
historical and theoretical political economy was established with his belief that all capitalist
economies eventually converge to the pure capitalism.
Marx did not foresee the historical evolution of the cap ...

... production process. This means that customers
cannot consciously ‘reward’ or compensate any
inputted resources, or any suppliers of those
resources (we take up this point later). We could
note here that this argument differs from other
approaches, notably Hunt’s (1995, p. 323), who
states that perce ...

... “economic manuscripts”. As one of the major classical social theories, I
believe it is wide enough in scope to provide ample material for methodological analysis. Moreover, it explicitly states its “critical” aims: the
subtitle of Capital reads “A Critique of Political Economy”.1
As I shall try to ...

... Quite aside from the obvious muddle between the rate of profit and its mass, the
supposed indeterminacy of profit rates implies that any tendency towards
overaccumulation must be relative to consumption rather than profitability.
Harvey’s method and Marx’s
No doubt we can all deepen our understandin ...

... Marx observes an initial “use-value” in the commodity-object which is “outside us”: “A
commodity, such as iron, corn…is therefore a use-value, something useful.” The use-value
of the commodity “satisfied human wants of some sort of another.” Marx’s economic object
arrives after it has achieved use-v ...

... determination of the supply curve, given quantities and prices . In the light of this
H .L . Moore, quite correctly, characterised Marshall's method of study as "static
and limited to functions of one variable" . [7]
) .B . Clark, the influential American theorist of a generation ago, did, in
Schump ...

... Fourthly: "Since the circulation process of capital is
not completed in one day but extends over a fairly
long period... it is quite clear that between the
starting-point.. and... the end... elements of crisis
must have gathered and develop" (p.495). If all
capitalist decisions to order or commissio ...

... Our view, commencing rather from Rancière’s analysis, incorporates the
concept of fetishism into the theory of ideology and does not reject it as an idealistic
construction. This, precisely, is how it succeeds in identifying the actual idealism that
pervades many of the anthropological readings of t ...

... close attention to the question of where an investigation of capitalist society should begin.
See [Car75, p. 89]. Does critical realism share this concern about the starting point?
As far as the broad lines of the argument are concerned, the starting point is extremely
important for critical realism ...

... In any case, while Marx may have supported worker management, and possibly even
some sort of markets over planning under certain circumstances, the evidence is strong
that he preferred state ownership to cooperatives, and did not view the latter as fully
socialist. This leaves some space between Ma ...

... Capitalism is defined as a social and economic system where capital assets are mainly owned
and controlled by private persons, where labor is purchased for money wages, capital gains
accrue to private owners, and the price mechanism is utilized to allocate capital goods between
uses. The extent to w ...

... German economist G.Kohlmey was denying the existence of an international rate of profit, the reasons being
twofold(Raffer, 1987). Firstly, low wages, low prices of land and low organic composition of capital as well as
high rates of exploitation imply that profit rates in the periphery will usually ...

... inequalities in the distribution of income generated by capitalism ultimately undermines the drive for
capital accumulation by exacerbating problems of effective demand. In most renditions of
underconsumption theory, the source of the problem of effective demand is identified as the restricted
purch ...

Law of value

The law of value (German: Wertgesetz) is a central concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy, first expounded in his polemic The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with reference to David Ricardo's economics. Most generally, it refers to a regulative principle of the economic exchange of the products of human work: the relative exchange-values of those products in trade, usually expressed by money-prices, are proportional to the average amounts of human labor-time which are currently socially necessary to produce them.Thus, the fluctuating exchange value of commodities (exchangeable products) is regulated by their value, where the magnitude of their value is determined by the average quantity of human labour which is currently socially necessary to produce them (see labor theory of value and value-form). In itself, this theorem is fairly simple to understand, and intuitively it makes sense to many working people. Theorizing its implications is, however, a much more complex task; it kept Marx busy across more than two decades.When Marx talked about ""value relationships"" or ""value proportions"" (German: Wertverhältnisse), he did not mean ""the money"" or ""the price"". Instead, he meant the value proportions that exist between products of human labour. These relationships can be expressed by the relative replacement costs of products, as labour hours worked. The more labour it costs to make a product, the more it is worth, and inversely the less labour it costs to make a product, the less it is worth. Money-prices are at best only an expression or reflection of Marx's value relationships - accurately or very inaccurately. Products can be traded above or below their value in market trade, and some prices have nothing to do with product-values at all (in Marx's sense), because they refer to tradeable objects which are not regularly produced and reproduced by human labour, or because they refer only to claims on financial assets.